January is the month of the annual March for Life in Washington, DC. Each year since 1974, pro-lifers have gathered in the nation’s capital to rally and show our elected leaders that we want an end to abortion and to provide greater protections for women and their babies.
“Life is a Gift” is the theme of this year’s march. How beautiful to see an unplanned pregnancy as an unexpected gift! But there’s a flipside to the “gift coin,” and it shows its face when the gift of life doesn’t come when planned or expected.
Those struggling with infertility will likely, in one way or another, face the great temptation of IVF, a practice that routinely ends in the destruction of the smallest—those wee gifts of life—among us. Whether it’s wanting to have a child through a pregnancy just like everyone else or not wanting to deny would-be grandparents the biological grandchild they so desire, the temptation can be strong. All the more reason we need to understand and share with others why our Church opposes the practice. All the more reason, too, we need to push for regulation of this largely unregulated industry. These must also be our pro-life goals.
Full disclosure: I am an infertile woman who has never been pregnant. Although we resisted the siren call of the IVF doctors, in my darkest days I could certainly see how tempting their promises of a pregnancy and a baby could be. I am also a mother of four through adoption. All my sons, but for the grace of God, could have been aborted.
Those struggling with infertility are not always easy to help. Maybe that new young couple in your parish is avoiding making friends or joining activities because the risk that someone will ask them if they have any children is too high. Maybe the pain is too raw. In a season of infertility, it’s easy to suffer alone and in silence. You might believe that if you never admit your struggles out loud perhaps they aren’t real, or perhaps you can wait them out somehow.
Without realizing it, many of us may not know what to do with married couples without children. We might secretly judge them for using contraception. We might think the reason they’re not yet pregnant is that the wife works too hard or is too thin, or he travels too much for work or enjoys happy hour a little too often. We might even subconsciously fear infertility is contagious.
Even when we suspect they’re struggling with medical infertility, the idea of approaching them to offer comfort or support actually makes us uncomfortable. What if we say the wrong thing? What if my children—or worse, my pregnant belly—only make her feel sadder than she already feels?
When you’ve been keeping your infertility a secret for so long—when you’ve avoided opportunities for good counsel—it will start to get easier to see IVF as okay. You might tell yourself that you wouldn’t create excess embryos or screen for genetic abnormalities. And you would never, ever resort to “selective reduction” (aka abortion) in the case of a high-risk multiples-pregnancy.
In your mind, you would simply be using the science of medicine to help the gametes do what they’re not managing on their own. You and your husband will tell yourselves that you will be doing this together, out of love for one another, and that God will understand, because nothing else you’ve tried is working.
You’re tired and depressed. Your womb aches with emptiness, and there is still no babe to rest upon your bosom. You are so, so lonely because you have decided to isolate yourself until this nightmare is over, and you never have to talk about it again.
But—and here’s the rub—the truth is that it will be difficult if not impossible to find a doctor or fertility clinic willing to work with you on your terms. They’ve likely received requests like yours before, and when they hear them, they think “Catholic.” Maybe even “crazy Catholic” (and, believe me, that’s not crazy in a good way).
Without going into my whole infertility story, I’ll just share one tidbit. We were adamant from the start that we would not be doing IVF. Still, the clinic pushed us, bullied us really, to enroll in their IVF program at every doctor visit. They mocked us for some of the Church-approved methods we used during diagnostic testing. In the end, when it was clear our doctor was growing impatient with the zero-success rate of the low intervention treatments he’d been humoring us with thus far, he tried one, last tactic to convince us on IVF.
That tactic was screaming. Screaming, “I’m creating life back there not destroying it!” This is the same guy who had tried buttering us up by telling us he was a “cradle Catholic.” I am sure there are kinder doctors with gentler bedside manners, but if they are in the business—the big money business—of IVF, then they are probably not a fit for the faithful Catholic couple seeking answers (and solutions) to their infertility.
Sadly, many Catholics aren’t aware of Church teachings that address medical treatments for infertility. Nor do they know of the destruction and utter disrespect of human life—the utter rejection of life as a gift—inherent in the practice of IVF. Or they may think the Church’s stance is outdated, unkind, or anti-science.
Consider the Catholic couple who told their story to NPR in 2024. They had married “a little bit later in life” and wanted children. When they decided to pursue IVF, they asked fellow parishioners to pray for them without, tellingly, seeking counsel from their priest. “It really, really kind of makes me feel very nauseated to have people that are not in the medical profession telling people going through this process that there’s something wrong with it,” the wife said.
The widespread use of these reproductive technologies almost guarantees that you have sat in a pew with a family that used IVF. Many argue in good faith that IVF is pro-life and pro-family, but these wishful arguments ignore or gloss over the cold, hard fact that IVF only leads to more lives destroyed or warehoused among the million embryos in perpetual cryostorage.
When we love someone, we tell them the truth because our job is to help them get into heaven. It’s time for all of us to take to heart the theme of this year’s March for Life, “Life is a Gift,” and be not afraid to talk about not only the evil of abortion, but also the truth about IVF. We owe it to those we love to share with them what is true and beautiful about marriage, sex, and children.
Children are not something we are owed. Nor do we get to choose how and when they come into the world.
This month, let us remember the unborn lives taken by abortion, and let us also not forget the little souls lost because they were judged defective, or imperfect, or just extra.
Editor’s Note: For more advice and testimony on the struggles of infertility, check out this author’s new book, Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive, available from Sophia Institute Press.
Photo by Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash
